Either case would be the “biggest single budget cut we’ve ever had
from the state,” said Greg Rosine, WMU’s vice president for government
affairs and university relations.

Rosine added that the proposed aid would take the university back to state funding levels of the early 1990s.

Another consideration is that the cost-of-living has gone up “at a
fairly good clip every one of those years,” said Lowell Rinker, WMU vice
president for business and finance.

Snyder’s spending plan for Michigan contains an array of budget
reductions and tax plans. The state’s 15 universities would take at
least a 15 percent cut in aid in one year. That almost matches the 18
percent in cumulative reductions universities have experienced in the
past 10 years, according to Mike Boulus, executive director of the
Presidents Council, State Universities of Michigan.

Individual institutions would get a deeper hit for not falling in
line with the tuition restraint in Snyder’s proposal to keep costs down
for students.

But Boulus said “that is a cut and cap and that’s unprecedented. ...
It really puts an unprecedented limitation on university boards.”

The combination of a state-aid reduction and capping how much the
university could lean on tuition to make up the difference would
translate into budget cuts at WMU, Rinker said.

“They’re really controlling both ends of the budget,” he said.

But Rinker isn’t panicking. WMU officials haven’t yet run through
the various scenarios yet, with Snyder’s spending plan just days old.

Plus, the state Senate and House still must weigh in with their plans for the budget.

“We aren’t going to burn a lot of energy on something we know is going to change,” he said.

The great likelihood is some degree of state funding will be cut, but the question is how much.

“The governor had a very difficult job to put a big structural
deficit into balance. He can’t do that without affecting every facet of
the budget,” Rinker acknowledged.

What it means downtown

The city of Kalamazoo would lose about $900,000 if its
revenue-sharing payments were slashed by 40 percent, said Thomas
Skrobola, the city’s finance director.

But when all is said and done, the real loss that city officials may have to deal with could be more like $200,000, he said.

The city also receives “constitutional” revenue-sharing payments,
which can’t be cut by lawmakers and may increase next year, Skrobola
said.

Kalamazoo Mayor Bobby Hopewell said the city will “have to go back to
the drawing board” to find additional cost savings if the cuts are
approved later this year by the state House and Senate.

“I’m not going to be the ‘sky-is-falling’ guy,” Hopewell said. “We
have to maintain a city, and we will. It’s just going to become more
difficult.”

What retirees think

Taxing pensions and cutting into the financial resources of senior
citizens in other ways, as the new governor’s budget plan proposes,
isn’t fair, senior-rights activists say.

“Some people, their pensions are barely (enough to be) survivable as
it is, and now you’re taking food off their table,” said Joe Schmitt,
vice president of Kalamazoo County Advocates for Senior Issues, who is
from Portage.

He said, “Food will have to become something that is optional, and we know it isn’t.”

A pension tax is part of Snyder’s $45.9 billion budget proposal,
Schmitt said. He said it is being presented to the Legislature in the
same bill as his business tax-cut proposal in order to give the
controversial pension tax a better chance of success.

“As far as KCASI is concerned, it looks like they’re trying to
balance the budget again on the backs of seniors and children,” Schmitt
said. “There are ways of doing it that wouldn’t be so unfair.”

Schmitt said, for example, that people with larger pensions would be more able to afford being taxed.

“If you have to, tax the pensions, just don’t do it from ground zero,” he said.

“It just seems that they’re breaking the backs of the vulnerable to
attract employers to the state,” Schmitt said. “I’m not opposed to
attracting employers, but let’s do it in an ethical manner.”

“All cuts need to be looked at ... but we need to be fair about the
whole budget, and to take everything away from seniors ... doesn’t seem
to be fair, especially the low-income seniors,” said Sara Wick, also of
Portage and a member of the KCASI board.

But Toni Willette, of Kalamazoo, said it is incumbent upon everyone
to bite the bullet and get the state through its financial nightmare.

“We all have to sacrifice. We’re seniors, and we struggle along, but
nobody can be excluded from this,” said Willette, who called the
governor’s budget proposal “fabulous.”

”It’s just plain necessary,” she said. “The state just doesn’t have
money; the federal government has even less. I just think it’s long
overdue.”

Willette said people should learn to prepare for their own retirements.

“We’re in our 80s,” she said of her and her husband, Jim. “We started
being responsible for ourselves a long time ago — no pensions, no
handouts. ... We live frugally.”